21 - Child slavery. cover art

21 - Child slavery.

21 - Child slavery.

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 Child slavery. The enslavement of children can be traced back through history. Despite the fact that slavery has been abolished, children continue to be enslaved and trafficked to this day, particularly in developing countries. Like other forms of modern slavery, child slavery is also often linked to poverty, as some impoverished families "sell" their children to their captors because they cannot adequately take care of them and do not see any other option. History. Child slavery refers to the slavery of children below the age of majority. Many children have been sold into slavery in the past for their family to repay debts or crimes or earn some money if the family were short of cash. In the Roman Empire, the children of a slave woman normally became the property of her owner. This was also the case in Korea around 1000 AD. Since slavery among the Maya and indigenous people of North America could be inherited, the children of the Indians could be born slaves. In the Islamic world. In the entire Islamic world, the institution of slavery was regulated by the slavery regulations prescribed by religious sharia law. These also described sexual relationships with slaves and consequently child slavery. By Islamic law, slaves could be acquired through direct capture in warfare as kafir from Dar al-harb; via a middle man trade network (essentially foreign slave merchants); or by being born in to slavery, which meant both of their parents, or their only known parent, was a slave. A Muslim man was allowed by law to have sexual intercourse with his own female slave in accordance with the principle of concubinage in Islam (without it being defined as extramarital sex or zina). The child of a slave was born a slave, unless the male slave owner acknowledged the child of his female slave as his, in which case the child would be born free. If a master chose to acknowledge his child with his slave, then the slave mother herself would become an umm al-walad and free when her enslaver died, though she continued to be a slave during his lifetime unless he chose to manumit her. Traditionally, royal dynasties in the Muslim world customarily used slave concubines for procreation, and the children of royal concubines were routinely acknowledged. However, this was not necessarily the case with a common slave master and his female slave. The Islamic Law formally prohibited prostitution. However, since Islamic Law allowed a man to have sexual intercourse with his personal sex slave, prostitution was practiced by a pimp selling his female slave on the slave market to a client, who returned his ownership of her after 1–2 days on the pretext of discontent after having had intercourse with her, which was a legal and accepted method for prostitution in the Islamic world. Children were also subjected to sexual exploitation. Islamic law was based on the life of Muhammed. The marriage between Muhammed and Aisha, which was reportedly consummated when the bride was nine, and marriage and sexual intercourse was customarily allowed with girls from the age of nine. In his contemporary report A Report on Slavery and the Slave Trade in Zanzibar, Pemba, and the Mainland of the British Protectorates of East Africa from 1895, Donald MacKenzie noted, in regard to slavery in Zanzibar, that sexual slavery did not, in fact, result in many children, which necessitated the need for constant slave import: "It is a curious fact that Slaves have but very few children, owing, it is said, to the manner in which very young girls are treated by the Arabs and others ; hence the necessity for the continued importation of raw Slaves to supply the demand. I was much struck with the evidence of non-increase amongst the Slaves as regards children. Taking the death-rate at 30 per mille, upwards of 7,000 Slaves would have to be imported annually to supply this deficiency in labour". In the United States. Novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about a woman a slave owner bought to breed children to sell. The expectations of children who were either bought or born into slavery varied. Scholars noted, "age and physical capacity, as well as the degree of dependence, set the terms of children's integration into households". The duties that child slaves were responsible for performing are disputed among scholars. A few representations of the lives that slave children led portrayed them as, "virtually divorced from the plantation economy until they were old enough to be employed as field hands, thereby emphasizing the carefree nature of childhood for a part of the slave population that was temporarily spared forced labor". This view also stated that if children were asked to perform any duties at all, it was to perform light household chores, such as being "organized into 'trash gangs' and made to collect refuse about the estate". Opposing scholars argued that slave children had their youth stolen from them, and were forced to start performing ...
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